1. Peter Weidkuhn, "Le Carnaval de Bâle ou l'histoire inversée," in Les Grandes Traditions de la fête, ed. G. S. Métraux (Paris, 1976), p. 40, continue

fig. 7. On the use of festive personae to express satire and criticism and to license rebellious political actions in the Renaissance, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule" and "Women on Top" in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975).

2. The discussion of taboo topics puts great pressure on scholarly writers to adopt comic masks in their prefaces and epilogues. An extreme example of this is Gustave Witkowski's L'Art chrétien, ses licences (Paris, 1912), which he frames with a self-mockingly philosophical preface beginning "The Ego is detestable" and ends with a facetious, black-bordered announcement of his own demise.

3. A version of the first chapter of this book was given as a talk for the Chaucer Division of the Modern Language Association, 29 December 1985, in Chicago.

4. Melanie Klein, "La Personnification dans le jeu des enfants," Essais de psychanalyse (1921-1945), trans. M. Derrida (Paris, 1984), pp. 243-51.

5. G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 154-55. R. M. Lumiansky quotes this passage in the introduction to Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin, 1955), pp. 5-6, and proceeds on the same assumptions as Kittredge concerning the realism of Chaucer's use of dramatic conventions.

6. Donald Howard, in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), calls attention to this layering of voices:

[Chaucer] places over his mask of the fool the masks of the pilgrims which he has displayed before us in the General Prologue. Yet each of these pilgrims whose roles he plays is himself a performer who plays the roles of various figures in his own tale. (In some instances the figures in a tale are performers too: Chauntecleer performs two tales, complete with characters, plot, and dialogues.) We have therefore a performer playing the parts of performers.
(p. 195)

7. For some of the authenticating conventions of medieval historical narrative, see Jeanette Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva, 1981). Guido delle Colonne's Latin-prose Historia destructionis Troiae has been edited by Nathaniel Griffin (Cambridge, Mass., 1936) and translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington, Ind., 1974). See Leopold Constans's edition of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, 6 vols. (Paris, 1904-1912).

8. Guido, Historia, trans. Meek, book 9, p. 86: "It was the time when winter had already shed its frost, and its cold was dispelled on account of the season. . . . The sun was running in the last stages of Pisces . . . and the month of March which was to follow was already near. At this time the whole Greek army, well supplied with a large fleet, had assembled in the port of the city of Athens."

9. V. L. Dedeck-Héry, "Boethius' De Consolatione by Jean de Meun," continue

Mediaeval Studies 14 (1952): 168, lines 10-18. In Chaucer's Narrators (London, 1985), p. 102, David Lawton argues that Chaucer is presenting himself in the apology of his "General Prologue" as a transcriber; Lawton then, rather too hastily, equates transcription with translation: "the narrator as poet presents his transcription of the pilgrim's pretended experience as an act of translation (730-6), a task no different from that of Troilus . All writing, so apprehended, is indeed a matter of 'translating an invisible text.' The author's apology centres primarily on style. . . . The true reporter, in seeking to translate 'pleynly,' must reproduce others' words 'proprely': the theory is conventional and it is one of stylistic decorum." No sources of this "conventional" theory are cited.

10. Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, p. 9, verses 135-40.

11. On the practice of late medieval historians, see Bernard Guenée, "L'historien par les mots," in his Politique et histoire au moyen âge (Paris, 1981), pp. 221-37.

12. Howard, The Idea, p. 143, has called attention to "this fictional tour de force of memory."

13. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. J. A. Buchon, 16 vols. (Paris, 1824-1829), vol. 9, p. 299 (from book 3). Froissart's compositional process, from the rapidly recorded building block of the mémoire to the embellished or historiated chronicle, seems to foreshadow the division of labor described by fifteenth-century historical writers. In the prologue to his work, which is known as a chronicle, Jean Le Fèvre describes his office in the Burgundian chivalric order of the Golden Fleece as that of a recorder of written mémoires of events. Le Fèvre then sends these mémoires to the court orator, Georges Chastelain, who, "according to his pleasure and discretion, would employ them in the noble histories and chronicles he made" ( Chronique de Jean le Fèvre, ed. François Morand, 2 vols. [Paris, 1876], vol. 1, p. 1). Whereas Jean writes his "little book" (really a long chronicle) in his "gros" and "rude langaige" of Picard ''after the manner of a record or mémoire, " Chastelain's duty is to turn this "crude" historical matter into an elegantly laudatory Latin work.

14. Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, pp. 7-8, verses 113-33.

15. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965-1970), vol. 2, p. 175, verses 5683-89.

16. John Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton, 1984), p. 102.

17. See Glending Olson, "Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer," Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 272-90.

18. For more detailed discussion, see my book The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), especially the chapter "Jonglerie and the Missing Signs."

19. Alain de Lille, for instance, in his De Arte praedicatoria (J. P. Migne, continue

Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina, 221 vols. [Paris, 1844-1864], vol. 210, col. 112), considered leonine (heavily or internally rhymed) verse theatrical, typical of actors and mimes, hence to be avoided in preaching; and in his early-thirteenth-century Ars versificatoria, Matthew of Vendôme reiterated that the empty formalism of leonine verse was the province of jongleurs and mimes (ed. Edmond Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XII ^e et du XIII ^e siècles [Paris, 1958], p. 166). Nicholas of Senlis in 1202 went so far as to pronounce that "No story set to rhyme is true," as Paul Zumthor reminds us in La Lettre et la voix (Paris, 1987), p. 203.

20. Charles H. Livingston, Le Jongleur Gautier Le Leu (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), "De Deus vilains," p. 206, verses 169-76. The name of the storyteller in this fabliau, Goulius (Glutton), is reminiscent of the Golias persona of much medieval Latin goliard play.

21. Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, p. 1, verses 1-39.

22. For Dares' brief and very rudimentary descriptions of physical features and temperaments, see Daretis Phrygii, De excidio Troiae Historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig, 1873), pp. 14-17. Benoît de Sainte-Maure emphasizes the reliability of Dares' eyewitness accounts. He tells us that the Trojan Dares, who was "marvellously" learned in all the seven arts and who realized the magnitude and import of the war, nightly wrote down the events of the preceding day (Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, pp. 6-7, verses 91-116). Benoît greatly amplifies the details of Dares' "objective" portraits of Greek and Trojan heros and heroines (ibid., pp. 263-92, verses 5073-562), as does Guido delle Colonne in his Latin prose version (Griffin, ed., Historia, pp. 83-87). Furthermore, Guido follows his portrait series with an elaborate spring topos opening (quoted in n. 8 above) not found in Dares, who merely lists the Greek leaders and ships that gathered to sail for Troy. For detailed comparisons of Benoît's with Chaucer's portraits, see R. M. Lumiansky, "Benoît's Portraits and Chaucer's General Prologue," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55 (1956): 431-38.

23. Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou trésor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948), p. 204. The self-ridicule that distinguished the medieval jongleur remains a basic technique of modern stand-up comedians. By creating regressively infantile, foolish personae and thus deauthorizing or negating the seriousness of their words and gestures, modern comedians' self-mockery enables them to make extremely aggressive attacks on those in power. A master of such techniques was the French comedian Michel Coluche, the "buffoon of the French Republic," a comedian whose very name recollected the "coqueluche" (cock's comb) of the medieval fool's hood and whose persona was that of the plump enfant terrible from the suburbs (the margins), who continue

would be restricted by none of the rules of adult life, neither of polite behavior and manners nor of polite speech (his was filled with vulgar, slangy references to the body, sex, and excrement). Dressed in the bibbed overalls of a modern two-year-old or a manual laborer, he ran in the 1981 French presidential election in order, so he later said, to mock the grotesqueness of it, and his burlesque commentaries on political events and men in power were always cutting, truthful, and foolish. Because of Coluche's ability not only to express Everyman's hostility and frustration but to deny and control it through laughter, politicians may miss him most.

24. Howard, The Idea, p. 231.

25. On the ambiguity of this passage and of Chaucer's version of it, see P. B. Taylor, "Chaucer's 'Cosyn to the Dede,'" Speculum 57 (1982): especially p. 324: "Chaucer's epigram, as well as Jean de Meun's, plays on the word cousin . Besides 'blood-relative,' cousin denotes a 'dupe.' The word belies the thing it identifies or the idea it expresses. The pun dislodges Plato's point by affirming the ability of words to misconstrue the deeds they render while posing as the 'natural' expression of them."

26. Le Roman de la rose, ed. Lecoy, vol. 2, p. 211, verses 15, 161-62, for the maxim; Jean's equivocal discussion of the relationship between words and choses ("things") begins several lines earlier.

27. Howard, The Idea, p. 302.

28. W. Beare, The Roman Stage (London, 1950), p. 150.

29. Florence Ridley, The Prioress and the Critics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 16-18.

30. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, Eng., 1973); Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London, 1980), p. 4.

31. John B. Friedman, "The Prioress's Beads 'of smal corel,'" Medium Aevum 39 (1970): 301-5. The Prioress's rosary beads "gauded al with grene" (A 150) may be loaded with more equivocal meanings than have already been discovered in the medieval symbolism and uses of coral and the "Amor vincit omnia" motto of the pendant brooch. In "Chaucer's Puns: A Supplementary List" ( PMLA 73 [1958]: 168), Paull Baum did not mention the possible pun on sexual desire in "grene'' nor the joyful connotations of the English word "gauded," which recollects the Latin gaudium and the French gauder, a verb of rejoicing that might be used in both sacred and secular contexts. From the same root, listed by Frédéric Godefroy in his Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française (10 vols. [Paris, 1880-1902]), vol. 4, pp. 244-45, are the Old French nouns gaudete and gaudine (a fun-loving woman or a pleasing woman) and gaudee (a "prayer said in haste and without paying attention" [perhaps because the thoughts continue

of the one who prays are distracted by worldly enjoyment]). Chaucer's phrase "gauded with grene" may describe not only the Prioress's beads themselves but also the spirit in which she tells, or plays with, them--with thoughts distracted by amorous pleasures. According to the Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and S. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, 1952-), the noun grene * means sexual desire, as in the example given from Havelok (vol. G1, p. 336):

Of bodi was he mayden clene,
Neuere yete in game ne in grene
Wit hire ne wolde leyke ne lye,
No more than it were a strie.

For Chaucer, grene must have been a Northernism, a dialectal word. He may be playing the old goliardic and jongleuresque game of using a vulgar or dialectal pronunciation or meaning to subvert a more pious, proper one.

32. Pamphile et Galatée, ed. Joseph Morawski (Paris, 1917), p. 5, verse 48. For a complete list of appearances of the name Eglantine in Old French narrative sources, see Louis-Fernand Flutre, Table des noms propres avec toutes leurs variantes figurant dans les romans du moyen âge (Poitiers, 1962), p. 7.

33. To verify pastourelle conventions, one has but to leaf through a collection such as Karl Bartsch's Romances et pastourelles françaises des XII ^e et XIII ^e siècles (Leipzig, 1870). Curiously, the fruit of the eglantine, a sort of large rose hip, also appears in medieval verse. Peire Cardenal uses this fruit as a symbol for deception in two thirteenth-century Provençal lyrics. In "Un sirventes si en cor que comens," Peire compares a traitor to this fruit, "fleshy and round, full of evil humours" (no. 27, p. 156, verses 25-26), and in "Pos ma boca parla sens" (no. 64, p. 416, verses 37-45), he explicates the comparison ( Poésies complètes du troubadour Peire Cardenal, ed. René Lavaud [Toulouse, 1957]):

Semblans es als aguolens
Crois homps can gen si garnis
Que de foras resplendis
E dins val mais que ninens.
Ez es majers fenhemens
Que is us escaravais
Si fenhia papagais
Can si fenh que pros hom sia
Uns fals messongiers savais.

Similar to the eglantine's fruit / is the vulgar man when he dresses like a gentleman / so that he is splendid on the outside / and worth less than nothing on the inside. / And it is a greater deception / than if a dung beetle / pretended to be a parrot / when a false, low-down liar / pretends to be a worthy man. break

If the worthlessness of the handsome fruit of the eglantine was proverbial, or if it was part of any medical or natural lore that Chaucer may have known, I have found no evidence of this.

34. J. L. Lowes, "Simple and Coy: A Note on Fourteenth-Century Poetic Diction," Anglia 33 (1910): 446.

35. Gustave Servois, ed., Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (Paris, 1893), pp. 68-69. Lines missing in the manuscript are denoted by centered ellipses in the following full citation and translation of "Bele Aiglentine": break

Bele Aiglentine, en roial chamberine,
Devant sa dame cousoit une chemise.

Ainc n'en sot mot quant bone amor l'atise.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

Devant sa dame cousoit et si tailloit;
Mès ne coust mie si com coudre soloit:
El s'entroublie, si se point en son doit.
La soe mere mout tost s'en aperçoit.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, deffublez vo surcot,

"Je voil veoir desoz vostre gent cors.
--Non ferai, dame, la froidure est la morz."
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, q'avez a empirier?
"Que si vos voi palir et engroissier."

     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

''Ma douce dame, ne le vos puis noier:
"Je ai amé .i. cortois soudoier,
"Le preu Henri, qui tant fet a proisier.
"S'onques m'amastes, aiez de moi pitié."
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, vos prendra il Henris?
--Ne sai voir, dame, car onqes ne li quis.

     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, or vos tornez de ci.
"Tot ce li dites que ge li mant Henri,
"S'il vos prendra ou vos lera ainsi.
--Volontiers, dame," la bele respondi.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

Bele Aiglentine s'est tornee de ci,
Et est venue droit a l'ostel Henri.
Li quens Henri se gisoit en son lit.
Or orrez ja que la bele li dit.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Sire Henri, velliez vos o dormez?
"Ja vos requiert Aiglentine au vis cler
"Se la prendrez a mouillier et a per?
--Oil," dit il, ''onc joie n'oi mes tel."
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

Oit le Henris, mout joianz en devint.
Il fet monter chevaliers trusqu'a .xx.,
Si enporta la bele en son païs
Et espousa, riche contesse en fist.
     Grant joie en a
Li quens Henris, quant bele Aiglentine a.

Beautiful Eglantine, in a royal chamber, / was sewing a shirt in front of her mother. / . . . / Not a word did she catch while love inflamed her. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

Before her mother she stitched and clipped, / but she was not sewing at all as she ought to. / She was troubled, and so she pricked her finger. / Her mother noticed this right away. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, take off your outer robe / . . . / I want to see your lovely body underneath." / "I will not, milady; the cold will kill me." / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, what is harming you / that I see you growing so pale and big?" / . . . / . . . / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"My sweet lady, I cannot deny it. / I made love with a courtly soldier, / the worthy Henry, who won such praise. / If you ever loved me, have pity on me." / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, will Henry take you?" / "Truly, I don't know, milady, for I never asked him." / . . . / . . . / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, now depart from here. / Say to Henry everything I ask, / whether he will take you or leave you this way." / "Gladly, milady," the beauty replied. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed. break

Beautiful Eglantine departed from there / and went straight to Henry's lodging. / Count Henry was lying in bed. / Now listen to what the beauty said to him. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Sir Henry, are you awake or asleep? / Eglantine with the pretty face asks you now / if you will take her for wife and companion." / "Yes," he said, "I've never had such joy." / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

When Henry heard this, he became joyful. / He ordered twenty knights to mount / and carried the beauty off to his land / and married her, made her a rich countess. / Great joy has / Count Henry when he has beautiful Eglantine.

36. Georges Duby discusses the historical situation behind such literary fantasies in Le Chevalier, la femme, et le prêtre (Paris, 1981), p. 166, for example.

37. For the short version, "Bele Eglentine," see Gaston Raynaud, Recueil de motets français des XII ^e et XIII ^e siècles, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 175-76. The context of this motet is the more common one of a manuscript collection of lyrics with no framing narrative. Paul Zumthor analyzes the "Bele Aiglentine" lyrics and uses them as an example of mouvance in "La Chanson de Bele Aiglentine," Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 8 (1970): 325-37, and again in his Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972), pp. 290-98. Zumthor argues in ''La Chanson," pp. 328-30, against the modern editorial assumption that all of the stanzas of the Roman's version of "Bele Aiglentine" must originally have been of equal length, an assumption that leads to the conclusion that any irregularities and "missing lines" in the sole surviving manuscript version must be due to unintentional errors of transmission. Zumthor's argument for deliberate change is supported by my interpretation of the Aiglentine lyrics as deliberately debasing parodies of courtly love situations, deliberately errant transmissions of an authoritative courtly text.

38. Dictionary compilers have traditionally turned a censoring or blind eye to subversive puns, near-puns, innuendos, images. Even if they list erotic or scatological meanings, "serious" dictionaries do not list veiled puns or innuendos or metaphors that seem in any way conjectural. In short, we should not expect to be able to authorize and validate subversive goliardic or jongleuresque linguistic play by turning to the conventionally censorious authority of dictionaries.

39. For the "Miracle de l'abbeesse grosse," see Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, ed. Gaston Paris and Ulysse Robert, 8 vols. (Paris, 1876-1893), vol. 1, pp. 58-100. When it has no metrical purpose, the scribal doubling of vowels in some words, such as "abbeesse" here (or Chaucer's "solaas"), may sometimes signal wordplay by exaggerating and dwelling on the letter (rather than the spirit). This particular play, from a cycle of miracles of the Virgin written for performance before or by members of a continue

late-fourteenth-century northern French puy, is full of erotic innuendos. A precursor of Molière's femmes savantes, Sister Ysabel protests that the priest seems to be trying to incite the nuns with his vulgar sermonizing interlarded with "foolish" (or sinful) words (or syllables understood as words):

Il semblera ja qu'il nous tence,
Tant sermonnera lourdement:
Car de soz moz dit largement
  En son preschier.
(p. 60, verses 38-41)

Indeed it would seem that he is inciting us / by preaching so laboriously; / for he uses foolish words freely / in his preaching.

The abbess responds to this complaint with a reprimand: Sister Ysabel would evidently rather be dancing than listening to sermons and ought not to have her mind on such "solace." ("Dancing" could be a metaphor for love play or sexual intercourse, the "old dance"; and "solace'' could suggest the same, as well as wordplay, often involving vulgar innuendos.) Sister Ysabel's protest prepares us to perceive the erotic innuendos in the text of the priest's sermon, which is a biblical-sounding pastiche of Matthew 11:28 ("Come unto me all ye . . .") and of the language of the Pauline epistles. The priest's text is "Transite ad me, omnes qui concupiscitis me, / Et generacionibus meis implemini" (p. 61, verses 52-53). Instead of covering up, the priest's vernacular gloss tends to point possible erotic innuendos in the text:

. . . car je vous puis nuncier
Que ceulx qui ce desir entier
Ont en eulz par devocion,
Sanz vaine similacion,
La doulce vierge les appelle
Par une escripture moult belle,
Laquelle je vous proposay,
Quant je mon sermon conmençay,
Et dit: Venez a moy, venez,
Vous trestouz qui me desirez,
Et je vous vouldray acomplir
Touz voz desirs et raemplir
Vous de mes generacions.
(p. 62, verses 106-14)

. . . for I announce to you / that those who have this desire wholly / within themselves through devotion, / without vain pretense, / the sweet Virgin calls them / with a very beautiful passage of Scripture / that I proposed to you / when I began my sermon / by saying: Come to me, come, / all you who desire me / and I would like to fulfill / all your desires and fill / you with my generations. break

The priest presents the speaker of the text he repeats as the "sweet Virgin," perhaps punningly pronounced verge (slang for penis) or easily misunderstood as such. Such a pun completely subverts any spiritual understanding of the pastiched scriptural text: "I would like to fulfill / all your desires and fill / you with my generations."

How are we to take such wordplay? For one thing, it is temporary; few plays in the miracle cycle are on such potentially comic subjects as a pregnant prioress. Once we recognize the signs of a temporary ritual reversal, of game overturning earnest, we are supposed to participate actively in the subversion of authority. We are not supposed to think that the characters of this miracle play are real people who intend erotic puns in addressing one another; rather, these characters are masking personae that allow their author and audience to play with the deauthorized words voiced through them. We enjoy the erotic puns and innuendos because of their incongruity and subversive effect in the mouths of religious personae. The erotic subtext is also perfectly appropriate to the burlesque plot of this miracle play in which the abbess will seduce and become pregnant by her clerk and then be rescued from the investigation of the bishop by a miraculous "Virgin delivery."